WAS DEVASTATING BLIZZARD CAUSED BY OBAMA POLICIES? Experts Point to New Study Linking Cooling Economy to Colder Weather & Climate

Last weekend a blizzard froze the Northeast in snows up to 40 inches deep, blacked out power to 700,000 people, and left at least 14 dead in the U.S. and Canada.

The economic chill caused by President Barack Obama's policies might be one of the reasons why Earth's weather is going wild, say experts – one of whom is a former think tank futurist and the author of a non-fiction bestseller about global climate change titled The Cooling.

Days before the blizzard hit, a new study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., predicts that if the world became “more European” – working fewer hours and taking more vacations – this could reduce future global warming by as much as 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit.

“If this is true, then President Barack Obama's economy-chilling new taxes and choking regulations could push us into a new Ice Age,” laughs Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and author of one of the most widely praised books about global climate change. Ponte was for 15 years the Roving Science Editor at Reader's Digest and the world's most widely read investigative science reporter.

“Because of President Obama's policies, 8.5 million fewer jobs exist in America today than when he took office four years ago, even though the U.S. population has increased by 9 million people,” says Ponte, author of the bestselling book The Cooling.

“America's economic growth has cooled to an almost-frozen halt, and plummeted to Minus 0.5 percent GDP growth, an icy dip to Recession level low grow, in the 4th Quarter of 2012.”

“If fewer work hours will cool Earth's climate by expending less energy, then 23 million Americans now unemployed, or able to find only part-time work, are chilling our economy and society to the bone,” says Ponte, who for 15 years was the Roving Science Editor at Reader's Digest Magazine.

“No wonder so many Americans are shivering with fear that our economy may not survive the next four years, and that our children have no future in the economic Ice Age that President Obama's policies are bringing on,” he says.

“And this weekend's storm could have been even worse if it had locked up over the Northeast,” says Ponte. “An almost-identical storm convergence called the Blizzard of 1888 did that for days, and it buried New York City in snow drifts 30 feet deep.”

Ponte and co-author Craig R. Smith, a famed monetary expert, explore forces that could bring down America's economy in their latest book, The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

In a chapter they titled “The Mandate of Heaven,” they examine how the continuing severe drought in America's heartland has raised the cost of food and fuel and lowered the level of the Mississippi River enough to impede barge traffic.

Experts this month warned that the continuing drought is lowering the level of the Great Lakes and threatens to reverse the flow of the Chicago River.

Such North American droughts, they note, have occurred repeatedly for thousands of years before humans could influence climate change.

“There's no doubt that weather and climate can affect the economy,” says Smith. “Since Biblical times people have understood that good weather brings rich harvests, feasts and prosperity, and that years of bad weather can cause famines and hardship.”

“What's interesting in this new liberal analysis,” says Smith, “is its idea that levels of unemployment and underemployment typical of European social welfare states could cool Earth's climate by slowing down productivity.”

“President Obama's blizzard of tax increases, frosty hostile-to-business regulations and icy class-warfare threats are moving America in the direction of becoming an economically frozen Euro-Socialist welfare state where businesses are afraid to invest or hire workers,” says Ponte.

The liberal study contends that Americans might happily give up a quarter of their income gains in exchange for more leisure and vacation time.

“We are turning into a low-work welfare state faster than most people understand,” says Ponte. “Fully 49.1 percent of American households already include at least one person who pockets some kind of government benefit.”

“It's something we have to decide as a country,” says the study's author David Rosnick.

“We used to be able to decide things as individuals,” says Ponte, “but in President Obama's America all that matters, increasingly, is the collective, whose politicians get power by making us dependent wards of the state.”

“And today's liberal solution is to de-industrialize the world's most advanced economy and become collectivist cave dwellers again in a new economic Ice Age, like Europe's past and present eco- and econo-primitive Neanderthals.”

1. A liberal think tank has proposed that if Americans become more “European” and work a lot less, reduced productivity could reduce future global warming by as much as 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit. What do you say?

2. Does this mean we can save the planet by becoming slackers or welfare recipients?

3. Why do you say that if this liberal study is right, then President Obama's economic policies could plunge America's climate into a new Ice Age?

4. Your book The Great Debasement explores how weather change could crash America's economy – even if, for example, the ongoing drought in America's heartland is not caused by man-made climate change. How?

5. What kind of new Dust Bowl or other threats are we facing today that America's uncertain economy could influence?

6. How can people protect themselves and their families from the economic and environmental changes we are facing?

ABOUT CRAIG SMITH…“The Face of American Small Business”

Craig R. Smith is an author, commentator and popular media guest because he instantly engages audiences with his common-sense analyses of local, national and global trends.

The Founder and Chairman of Swiss America Trading Corporation, Craig for 30 years has helped many thousands of people hedge against the problems of a weakening U.S. Dollar. A monetary expert, Craig is the author of numerous books and articles including The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...and Seven Ways to Stop It! (June 2011), and Crashing The Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse (2010).

Craig is also author of The Uses of Inflation: Monetary Policy and Governance in the 21st Century, a White Paper (Feb. 2011).

Media clips: www.craigsmith.com

ABOUT LOWELL PONTE…

Lowell Ponte (PON-tee) is a former think tank futurist and was an editor Reader's Digest Magazine for many years during its heyday when it was one of the most widely read publications in the world. Lowell is co-author with of The Inflation Deception: 6 Ways Government Tricks Us… and 7 Ways to Stop It! (2011), and Crashing The Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse (2010).

Ponte’s articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is currently a columnist at Newsmax.com. Lowell has been a guest on "The Today Show," "Good Morning America," "David Letterman" and other programs.

Lowell has also been an aide in the California legislature, a reporter in Washington, D.C., a foreign correspondent reporting from 33 countries, co-partner in a successful Hollywood public relations firm, and a radio talk show host.

About the Book…

THE GREAT DEBASEMENT: The 100-year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America’s Money Back “The greatest confiscation of wealth in human history.”

This is how business executive Craig R. Smith and futurist Lowell Ponte describe “The Great Debasement,” a manipulation of the U.S. Dollar that they calculate has since 1913 expropriated more than $222 Trillion from the American people.

Because of this deliberate century-long policy of debasing America's money, today's dollar has only 2 pennies of the purchasing power of the 1913 dollar.

The 2012 election and 2013 “Fiscal Cliff” of massive tax increases are ominous echoes of what happened exactly 100 years ago, warn Smith and Ponte.

The strange 1912 election turned America's government over to Progressives, who in 1913 imposed the Federal Reserve System and the income tax.

The 2012 election and 2013 Fiscal Cliff,” they say, could make Progressive rule permanent by turning a majority of voters into government dependents. America's central bank, the Fed, and income tax gave politicians almost-unlimited power to borrow, spend and expand government. The Federal Reserve was explicitly designed to turn the dollar into an “elastic” currency. The income tax forced Americans to accept and use this new ever-more-debased fiat monopoly money to pay their taxes. The 100th Anniversary of this Debasement brings America to a tipping point.

We are becoming “a 50-50 nation – half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits,” warns Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson.

Today 49.1 percent of households have at least one family member who gets a government benefit. More than 47 percent of adult Americans pay no income tax. Many dependents see government as a free goody-dispensing machine.

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic,” warned Benjamin Franklin at America's birth.

If Progressives win even one branch of government in the 2012 elections, their vision of ever-expanding government could become permanent by creating a voting majority of those dependent on, and addicted to, government money.

The Great Debasement created today's upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland economy in which the stock market goes up on bad news and down on good-- because major investors want whatever causes the Federal Reserve to conjure trillions more Quantitative Easing (QE) stimulus dollars out of thin air.

Modern Monetary Theory and neo-Keynesianism behind Fed and Federal policies teach that borrowing another $58,000 every second to fund 40 percent of Federal spending is good, but that people saving their money is bad. These theories teach that the dollar losing value (inflation) is good, but that the dollar gaining value (deflation) is bad. They teach that government should tax ever-more money away from productive business people to redistribute to the unsuccessful, whose faster spending supposedly accelerates economic growth.

After 100 years of the Progressive Great Debasement, paying off America's debts would require a stack of dollar bills stretching from Earth to beyond the planet Mars, 35.8 million miles away. Such astronomical debt is unsustainable. So many Americans are now unemployed or in poverty that today's Food Stamp recipients could produce a Progressive Depression soup line at least 17,564 miles long. Government checks conceal the Great Debasement's devastation.

This book offers vivid, dramatic examples of how today's increasingly-fragile economy could be shattered by a wide range of shocks – a new Middle East war, fuel shortages, high-tech terrorism, prolonged drought, collapse of the Euro, replacement of the weakening dollar as the world's Reserve Currency, or a continuing leftward shift in American politics that dries up investment and jobs in our formerly business-friendly nation.

The Great Debasement reveals how the dollar is already a dematerializing “ghost currency” as America follows the excessive spending-and-debt policies that undermined past empires. It shows how both prudent individual choices and restoration of the U.S. Constitution's standard for sound money could redirect our future away from a potential new Dark Age and toward a prosperous new Golden Age.